Four injured in Licking County house fire

Four persons, including three children, were injured this morning in a house fire near Utica in Licking County.

Lori Kurtzman, The Columbus Dispatch

JOHNSTOWN, Ohio — He was on his way home when the call crackled over the radio.

House fire. Possible entrapment.

Firefighter Brad Hill, who had just completed a 24-hour shift at Port Columbus, was less than a mile from the address. He pulled up to the house at 5425 Johnstown-Utica Road NW this morning and saw two women standing in the driveway. One was screaming. He didn’t notice the two children covered in soot, not at first.

Black smoke billowed from a front window.

Hill, who’s also a volunteer firefighter with Licking County’s Hartford Fire Department, radioed in that there was indeed a fire. He grabbed his gear from his pickup truck and was suiting up when he heard a crash.

“I took off running,” he said.

Hill, 27, of Homer, has been a firefighter for nine years. He has fought a lot of fires and knows about a mother’s instinct to rush into a blaze to save her child. Still, it was unnerving to see.

“There was no time to yell at her,” he said. “Boom — the window broke, and she was gone.”

One of the women in the driveway had thrown a flower pot into a window and climbed through to rescue her 1-year-old, who was in a crib inside. They were both out by the time Hill reached them. He grabbed the child, who was covered in thick black soot.

“Are you OK?” Hill asked. “Yes,” the child said.

Still, Hill called for a medical helicopter, not knowing what the toddler might have inhaled. He called for help for the woman, too, and for her two other children, one of whom is an infant and the other about 2 years old. The children went to Nationwide Children’s Hospital; the mother went to Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center. Their conditions were not known tonight, although their injuries appeared to be minor.

The names of the family have not been released.

State fire investigators combed through the house today to try to determine what caused the fire, which appeared to be contained to a front room. Seven departments responded to the call, and firefighters quickly knocked down the fire.

Hill’s father, John, the assistant chief of the Hartford volunteer department, also was returning home from a 24-hour shift this morning and arrived at the scene nearly an hour after his son had.

“I’m proud of him,” John Hill said. “He was in the right place at the right time.”